[Srilm-announce] [SRILM-Announce] SRILM 1.7.2 released

[Wen Wang]

The latest version of SRILM, 1.7.2,  is now available from

http://www.speech.sri.com/projects/srilm/download.html

A list of changes appears below.

Functionality:

         * Added interfaces to Lattice and WordMesh that allows external 
programs
         to map sausage nodes to their original lattice nodes.
         * New VocabDistance subclass StemDistance, comparing words only 
based on
         their stems.
         * New lattice-tool option -stem-dist triggers StemDistance use in
         confusion network alignments, including -add-hyps and -add-refs 
processing.
         * Add optional support for keyword spotting (in Lattice.h and
           LatticeIndex.cc) when writing a 1-gram index.
         * Added new File field NBestOptions::nbestRttm2, if it exists 
then write
           (an approximation to) the NBestList2.0 format output.
         * Added simple Trellis pruning based on relative thresholding 
of forward
         probabilities (Trellis::prune()).
         * make-big-lm now understands the -ukndiscount option. The 
make-kn-discounts
         helper script has an option to compute unmodified KN discounts.
         * The -version option now reports the compiler version used.
         * Added ngram-count -write-text option to test conversion of 
UTF-16 files
         to ASCII/UTF-8.
         * Added ngram -text-has-weights option to allow weighting 
sentences in ppl
         computation.
         * Added scripts nbest-words and compute-sclite-nbest for 
conveniently
         computing nbest-optimize -errors information using sclite.
         * Added the nbest-optimize -xval-files option to support 
cross-validation.
         * Added script search-rover-combo for searching for best 
combination among
         a list of systems.
         * Added confidence value fields to NBestWordInfo class.
         * Added check to compute-best-mix to warn about word label 
mismatches between input files.

         Portability:

         * Honor TMPDIR environment variable in various scripts.
         * Miscellaneous MacosX fixes.
         * Include BSD rand48 functions so that random sentence 
generation gives same
         result on all platforms.

         Bug fixes:

         * Avoid leaky backoff by mapping very small probability sums to 
0 in BOW
         computation.  Otherwise unseen ngrams may end up with nonzero 
probabilities
         in unsmoothed LMs.
         * Fixed compare-ppls compute-best-mix compute-best-sentence-mix 
ppl-from-log
         to recognize the MSVC representation of -infinity.
         * Fixed a bug in the handling of zero prefix probabilities in 
ClassNgram,
         HiddenNgram and HMMofNgrams.
         * Fixed a memory allocation bug that caused the 
ngram-count-maxent test
         to crash.
         * Fixes to lattice-tool rttm nbest output.
         * Fix for possible endless loop in lattice-tool 
-posterior-prune due to
         limited float precision (from Seppo Enarvi).
          * Fixed a problem with declaration of Map_nokeyP() that takes 
reference
         arguments and were missing "const"; was causing crash in 
segment tool.
         * Workaround for what looks like an optimizer bug in gcc >= 4.9 
that can
         cause ngram -prune to core dump.
         * Output TextStats quantities (sentence/word counts, log probs, 
perplexities),
         model parameters, nbest and lattices scores, and other 
quantities with full
         precision so as to avoid loss of information.
         * nbest-optimize -1best now outputs a rover-control file that 
simulates
         Viterbi decoding (by using a small posterior scale).
         * nbest-optimize -errors now tolerates varying number of 
reference words
         for the same sentence.  This can arise from sclite references 
with alternate
         words strings.
         * Fixed a stupid bug in uniform-classes.gawk script.
         * Allow combine-rover-controls to merge control files with the 
same systems
         in them, adding their weights.
         * Updated zlib to version 1.2.8.  This fixes a bug whereby 
gzipped output files
         could end up with zero size (instead of a legal gzipped file 
that results in a
         zero-length file when decompressed).


Cheers,

Wen